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I seem to have an awful lot of reading going on at the moment; some of these books have been sitting on my table for months (if not longer) and I will at some point have to decide whether I am going to persevere or give up, but not just yet, I think:
- The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell – “‘I am normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other‘ bewailed Lord Redesdale, father of the Mitford girls. Part of my Mitford obsession as mentioned briefly here.
- The Sicilian Vespers by Steven Runciman – “On 30 March 1282, as the bells of Palermo were ringing for Vespers, the Sicilian townsfolk, crying ‘Death to the French’, slaughtered the garrison and administration of their Angevin King.”
- Bone Song by John Meaney – “Tristopolis. Death’s City. Countless dead lie in the miles of catacombs beneath its streets.” Zombies and stuff in noir crime story.
- The Women of Muriel Spark and Muriel Spark – reading these as background to the great abandoned but about to be resurrected Reading Muriel Project
- Growing by Leonard Woolf – an autobiography of the years 1904 to 1911, set aside for some reason I can’t quite fathom
- The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti – to be dipped into, prose is very, very lush.
- Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris – forgot all about this one, must finish it as I’ve enjoyed the stories I’ve read so far
- Small Avalanches by Joyce Carol Oates – another dipper
- O, Beloved Kids by Rudyard Kipling – Kipling’s letters to his children, which was intended to kick-start a Kipling fest after I visited his house in the summer; still something I want to do…..
And sad to say I’m still reading some of the books on this list, namely:
- Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk – as recommended by the Book God after an excellent lecture on engaging with China which we attended at the British Museum
- The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks – vaguely unsettling what to do if they were real guide-book
- The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, edited by Jill Foulston – which called out to me by name when shopping in Blackwell’s on the Charing Cross Road for a present for Silvery Dude
Well, I have always had rather a soft spot for good old Alice, and having watched and enjoyed the re-imagining that was Tim Burton’s movie earlier this year, I was really up for having a punt at Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars.
So Alyss is being trained to become Queen of Wonderland after a period of horrendous civil war which saw her parents defeat her wicked Aunt Redd. Things go totally pear-shaped on her birthday and she is forced to flee to our world in order to save herself. There she becomes Alice and tells her story to Charles Dodgson who uses it as the basis for the books we know and love.
But can Alice really find happiness in the arms of Prince Leopold or will her destiny reclaim her?
Well, we all know what’s going to happen here.
I thought I would probably like this but wasn’t prepared for how much I would love it and how quickly I would read it. I loved playing spot the character: some of them pretty straightforward correlations to our Alice (Hatter M being the most wonderful to my mind) but others a little more difficult to fathom.
I liked the conceit of Alice being a foundling brought into the Liddell’s home and how no-one believes her fantastic tales, so much so that she begins to doubt them herself as she grows older. I loved the idea of her becoming Queen Victoria’s daughter-in-law. I loved how she got here and how she gets back. And I adored the monstrous figure that is Redd and the havoc that she unleashes.
And then, of course, there is the violence…..
I enjoyed it so much that I now have the two sequels and the first of the Hatter M graphic novels, and will indulge myself at a suitable point.
Really very clever indeed.
So I really did mean to take part properly in Jenny’s Diana Wynne Jones Week, but due to work and other personal (not nice) stuff I didn’t really get the chance, although reading The Tough Guide to Fantasyland certainly cheered me up no end during what turned out to be not a great couple of days
So, to the book, and it does what it says on the cover: provides budding participants in the Tour through Fantasyland with everything they will need to know to navigate their way through the whole Quest thing.
Because on a quest is what they will surely be (and that is so ungrammatical, but I don’t care).
It is also extremely funny. You can probably enjoy this if you’ve read little fantasy, but it is so much more fun if you’ve read a lot, and gosh I seem to have done that over the years.
So all the familiar stuff is here – there is a Map (wouldn’t be fantasy without a Map), the details about your companions on the quest, whole chunks explaining magic, and the important topic of catering, which basically comes down to eating a lot of stew.
And also why there are no longer many vampires in fantasy; they’ve been enticed away to the Horror Tour where they get better pay and conditions.
One of my favourite entries was the description of a fairly regular companion-type, the Female Mercenary, who has been inspired by her unpleasant past to become a mercenary and is good in a fight. She conforms to a certain physical type (tall, thin, wiry, silent) and is neurotic. And for the detail:
You can rely on her absolutely in a fight. She can usually kill two people at once while guarding your back in between. The rest of the time she will irritate you with lots of punctilious weapons cleaning and a perpetual insistence that a proper watch be kept. […] You will end up grudgingly admiring her.
Made me laugh out loud anyway. And the rest of the book is just like this.
I may never be able to read fantasy in the same way again, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
So I’ve been talking recently about my reading slump, and several people suggested that I needed to be reading more than one book at a time (I have tended to be very traditional and have no more than two, three at most, books on the go); that way I can switch as my mood takes me.
That may seem very obvious to many of you, but let’s note for the record here that one person’s obvious is usually my “jings, why didn’t I think of that?”
So I have thrown myself into this with gusto, and am currently at various stages of reading the pile at you see here:
- Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock – a planned read for the Once Upon a Time challenge, this is a sequel to the equally excellent Mythago Wood
- Making Money by Terry Pratchett – will confess that I’m stalled with this one, I should be loving it but am finding it difficult to pick up again – another planned read for Once Upon a Time
- The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd – recommended by the Silvery Dude and only started late last night – creepy
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – because I’m in a bit of a non-fiction phase and I keep on meaning to read this
- Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk – as recommended by the Book God after an excellent lecture on engaging with China which we attended at the British Museum
- Classic Crimes by William Roughead – what it says on the tin
- The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks – vaguely unsettling what to do if they were real guide-book
- The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, edited by Jill Foulston – which called out to me by name when shopping in Blackwell’s on the Charing Cross Road for a present for Silvery Dude
- Duncan Grant by Frances Spalding – a Bloomsbury fix for the Art History Reading Challenge
And I might even finish some of these!
Annabelle is a small rag doll who doesn’t know whether she is the cause of or merely a witness to the suffering of those people into whose possession she falls.
For suffering and misfortune are certainly all around her, and try as she might she cannot always warn or protect the innocent.
Or something along those lines.
Nightmares and Fairy Tales: Once Upon a Time is a creepily inventive little book of new horror stories and twisted re-tellings of fairy tales, all in graphic form. Wicked nuns, cruel parents, and even poor old Cinderella get the full treatment.
The only thing that saves this from totally over-the-top-grisly-goriness is the fact that it’s in black and white, but it’s still fairly horrible. And therefore right up my street!
This was my fifth read for the 2010 Graphic Novel Challenge, and did a lot to keep me awake during read-a-thon (largely cos I was too scared to sleep……..)
Signing up for the 2010 Graphic Novel Challenge gave me the perfect excuse (in case I really thought I needed one) to re-read the Neil Gaiman Sandman series from scratch, alongside the fascinating-and-occasionally-dipped-into-but-never-properly-read Sandman Companion by Hy Bender. And of course you start at the beginning, with Preludes and Nocturnes.
The thing about the need for an excuse is that my TBR pile (which with my tendency to be unable to avoid buying books plus all the stuff the Book God has in his possession) has actually become a TBR room, if not taking over the whole house, and so any re-reading has to be carefully thought through because there are just so many new(ish) books waiting for me to pick them up.
This is a problem that will not go away for two reasons:
- the Book God and I currently have a combined age of 106, and if you assume that we both started buying our own books as teenagers (let’s say arbitrarily 15) then that’s potentially 76 years of book buying
Which brings me to reason number 2:
- I am constitutionally incapable of getting rid of anything vaguely book shaped. At all. So I almost certainly have just about everything I have bought since I was a teenager
So you can see my problem.
Nevertheless the draw of Sandman was irresistible and I ploughed on, really enjoying the opportunity to get back inside a world that I have always enjoyed. And then another issue hit me – how do I review this? I mean, I can’t really review this as if I have come to it fresh, because I haven’t, and it is such a well-loved series and so many other bloggers have written about it all so eloquently. So I’m not going to attempt the feat at all.
I love it still, and if you haven’t read the series I urge you to have a go.
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I’ve also had a couple of relatively rare outings this week (I don’t count cocktails with Silvery Dude and friend on Wednesday because in my simple little mind that’s the sort of thing I should be doing every day); no, this is proper going out for the evening stuff, involving:
- on Thursday, the Birmingham Royal Ballet performing Sleeping Beauty at the London Coliseum – wonderful stuff with costumes based on the court of Louis XIV and a classic fairy tale on stage the way it should be done
- on Saturday, The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers at the Royal Albert Hall, with the full score performed live by the London Philharmonic Orchestra – and lovely to see Howard Shore, the composer, take a bow at the end.
And then home to Dr Who and River Song. What more could a girl want?
So having enjoyed volume one (reviewed here) and just so happening to have volume 2 kicking around the house for some strange reason, I decided to leap straight into the world of Fables once again with Animal Farm.
So after the fall out from the events of volume 1, not to be discussed here in case there is someone out there who has been even tardier than me in coming to the series, the Fabletown Mayor, Snow White, is heading upstate from New York for her annual visit to the Farm. This is the property, hidden by a glamour, where the non-human fables can live away from the prying eyes of the “normal” world. So we have the Three Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a few dragons and sleeping giants and so forth.
But all is not well; these fables want to take their homelands back from the Adversary, and are fomenting a revolution in order to do so, led by a very different take on Goldilocks than you would have seen before. Can Snow White stop them, and who can she trust to help her?
If anything this was even more fun than the previous story, with some well-known characters from literature (Shere Khan and Baghera, anyone?) involved, plus who could resist animals with weapons? Not giving away what happens but the fable approach to justice is brutal if necessary.
And you have to feel a bit sorry for Colin the Pig.
Will definitely be continuing to follow this series.
This was my third read for the 2010 Graphic Novel Challenge.
Well, bit of a blogging hiatus as I recovered from the fun-packed-but-tiring read-a-thon with a mountain (well, small pile) of reviews to catch up on both here and over at the Screen God blog. Plus work has been really busy so not reading much that’s new.
All very feeble excuses but the tide is about to turn, and I’m going to start with Bill Willingham’s Fables:Legends in Exile, first in a graphic novel series which is hugely popular in the blog world, and to which I have come, as always, as a late adopter.
So the land(s) of the fairy tale and other legends have been taken over by the minions of the evil being known (so far) only as The Adversary, and they have all been driven out to live alongside us normal folk (well, in New York) in their own environment of Fabletown. And there has been an apparent murder, so the question is who killed Rose Red?
This is really great stuff if you like the idea of a world ruled by King Cole, where Snow White is the Mayor and the Big Bad Wolf (in human form) is a private detective. The mystery isn’t really the point though it’s a good way to get immersed in the world of the fables.
So in summary, a good story, strong artwork and a nice premise makes for an enjoyable read.
And I went straight onto volume 2 which I’ll review shortly.
This was my second read for the 2010 Graphic Novel Challenge.
Spring is definitely here; the sun is shining, I have a couple of very well-deserved (in my opinion anyway) days off work and Carl has just announced Once Upon a Time IV, one of my very favourite reading challenges.
As per usual I’m going to commit to Quest the First, which involves reading five books from the categories of fantasy, folklore, fairy tale and mythology. I’ll almost certainly select from the following (not terribly long) list:
- The Dragon Waiting by John M Ford
- Tithe by Holly Black
- Snow White and the Seven Samurai by Tom Holt
- The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick
- The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu
- Making Money by Terry Pratchett
- White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
- The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip
- Songs of Earth and Power by Greg Bear
- Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
And who knows, I might even get to them all!
This is without doubt a beautifully written book. I finished it a while ago and have been mulling it over ever since, wondering what I could actually say about it without diminishing what was a truly lovely reading experience.
The Alchemy of Stone tells the story of Mattie, an automaton who has become emancipated (up to a point) and who has trained as an alchemist. It’s a dysfunctional society in which she lives, of Alchemists versus Mechanics, each with their own views on how the city should be run, and an underclass which appears to be rising up to overthrow the existing order.
Mattie treads a fine line between maintaining her independence and the need to find a way to get the thing she needs from the mechanic who made her – Loharri, who, though ostensibly letting her go, still holds the key which winds her heart.
I won’t say any more about the story itself, but it’s worth dwelling on the themes which develop within it.
This is a book about identity, what it means to be free, what it means perhaps to be a person. It’s also about class and oppression, about those who claim to know what’s best, about where women fit in to society, about the nature of difference, and about love. The quote on the cover of my edition says it better than I ever could:
A gorgeous meditation on what it means not to be human
And it has gargoyles.
And a man who absorbs the souls of the dead, who can still speak through him.
It’s steampunk at its best, with a main character of real substance, and an ending that I found moving, heart-breaking but also hopeful.
Seriously recommended. And if you’re not sure just look at Carl’s review here. Which has the wonderful cover that originally drew me to finding out about this book, though I’ve come to love the one on mine more.
I thought this was just lovely and am so glad that I was finally able to get my hands on a copy.
Bride of the Book God 